…and the house he shares with his people.

Landscaping: Part 1 of 8 million

Last Christmas, a very good friend who happens to be a landscape architect, gifted us with a landscaping plan that he prepared for our lot, using the original lot survey, the existing fence, a few mature trees that we’re keeping, and redoing almost everything else.

Our yard currently has a serious case of things having overgrown their spaces, or having been planted in too small a space for the variety’s mature size, so there’s a lot to remove. The landscaping plan will be implemented in phases over the next bunch of years, a few parts at a time. One of the first is the back fence line.

When we bought the house, the back property line was sort of a mess. There were (are) a few nice mature trees, but the rest is just kind of wild. It’s everything the developer didn’t bulldoze (back in 1985), and the previous owners left it that way. Although the real estate listing photo makes it look like there’s nobody behind us (overexposure FTW!), there are houses back there.

As trees have died, and as we’ve realized that we were unnecessarily ceding the back 10 feet or so of the property to no man’s land (which became more evident when the fence went in), we’ve started removing things. Last summer we cut down a bunch of “volunteer” trees that were scrawny and badly located, but the stumps were left behind:

So this spring we’ve been working on clearing that back corner out so we can start moving forward with it. We took the stumps all the way down to ground level, raked all the leaves out, and removed the pile of rotted firewood stacked between two maples (it had rotted even before we moved in), removed the dead varmint in that stack of firewood, and cut down the one maple that we felt ok about doing ourselves.

Yesterday’s starting point:

and Ending point, ten or so lawn & leaf bags later:

Ok, so let’s not lie. It’s still kind of a mess. But at least it’s a mess without piles of leaves, and we can see where the contours are that we need to level out a little. We can also see the rows of stones that make sort of a line of demarcation: probably the old owners “mow up to here” line. Those need to come up. But the amount of land that we’ve cleared out is probably almost as large as the entire backyard at our last house!

We have an estimate and are just awaiting a call back from the tree surgeon to schedule: The poplar (right most in the above photo, growing at an angle) and the maple up against the fence (leftmost tree inside the fence) are both coming down. The oak and maple in between are staying (and hopefully holding up a hammock someday). Once those are down, we need to even out the ground a bit, mulch, and start planting. These hollies are the first four of many that will line the back fence:

The plan is that they will grow tall enough to give us some year-round privacy from our rear neighbors, although we’ll need some patience for that. The yard is going to be a lot of work, but we look forward to having something a little more planned and a little less forever wild.